Get Your Data Clean: Gold Nugget Data

Is your Marketo database over the limit? Do you have lots of bad data living in your system?

The Gold Nugget data methodology is a systematic data retention process that helps organizations rid themselves of bad data. The Gold Nugget data methodology is part strategy and part execution that provides long term results for data management.

Once you have the strategy and process set, now it’s time to get things working in Marketo. Let’s dig in.

Give this Stuff a Home-A Data Cleanup Program

You are going to be doing a lot of data work so avoid using lists in the Lead Database–keeping your lists there will result in a lot of toggling back and forth between the Marketing Activities and Lead Database sections of Marketo.

Tip: Create a global data clean-up program that houses all of the data campaigns and lists. This will streamline ongoing management as all your cleanup campaigns will live in one place.

In the below screenshot, you’ll notice that Smartlists live separately from the cleanup campaigns themselves. This process makes it easier to spot check potential records to delete.

Step 1 – Get Rid of Duplicates

Marketo is not the ideal tool for removing duplicates but Marketo does provide a great way to easily assess duplicates. In your Master Data Retention program, create a Smartlist that identifies multiple records that share the same email address. You won’t get all the complex logic to identify duplicates with different email addresses but this list will provide a quick snapshot.

Once you get the count, dig into the data to see where the data might be coming from.

To perform the actual deduplication, you’ll need a third-party service or piece of software. See Step 1 in this post that describes the services.

How Often

Perform a one-time deduplication to start.

Run an ongoing service to reduce duplicates

Rinse and repeat #1 every 3 to 6 months to catch duplicates that get through your ongoing service.

Step 2 – Eliminate People without Email Addresses

Marketo records without email addresses are virtually useless as they can’t be mailed. They also increase the possibility for future duplicates. This step eliminates these records systematically once you have the strategy set.

Example: Any Lead record without an email address is deleted after 30 days from both Salesforce and Marketo. Contact records are deleted from Marketo but not Salesforce.

Considerations

Treat Lead and Contact Records differently? If using Salesforce, Lead records can generally be deleted since they are not marketable and don’t have revenue associated with them. Contacts require a bit more analysis. For example, an accounts payable Contact record might have an address for billing but not an email address. You probably don’t want to delete those folks.

Reporting history is lost or not available. If you have a trade show list that doesn’t have email addresses, implementing this policy will delete that intelligence. Of course, I’d argue to push your trade show vendor for email addresses but that is an argument for another day.

Leads can creep back into Marketo by default. If you delete out of Marketo but keep in Salesforce, set a flag in Salesforce so these records don’t flow back to Marketo unless an email address becomes available.

Delete in Salesforce? Marketo? Both? The reason you may keep records in Salesforce but delete them in Marketo is to reduce risk of deleting records that are important to Sales but not to Marketing. For example, you probably don’t want to delete a record that a Sales representative is actively calling even though it contains only an email.

Yes, Sales should always include an email address when entering a new record and Oscar presenters should always read the right results—“should” doesn’t always happen.

Step 3 – Purge Recently Deleted Salesforce Records

By default, records that are deleted in Salesforce are NOT deleted in Marketo. As a quick win, setup a campaign that runs regularly that clears out your deleted Salesforce records in Marketo.

How Often

Perform a one-time delete to start.

Rinse and repeat weekly with an automated batch campaign. I’d recommend to keeping it weekly or monthly as a backup process just in case some deletions happen in Salesforce that you want to get back.

Step 4. Delete the Disqualified

This step involves identifying Disqualified records and deleting them. Of course, you need to have a consistent process in place to make sure your Disqualified records are actually bad. A process where a Sales rep says a record is bad when it’s really not will lead to good data getting deleted.

Recommendation: Get conservative here. If you don’t know, wait until the Inactivity step 6 to delete.

How Often

Perform a one-time delete to start. You’ll want to develop some custom criteria so you aren’t deleting Recycled leads miscategorized as Disqualified.

Rinse and repeat quarterly/yearly once you have the Sales process down. Run deletions based on Disqualified Reasons. For example, a Spam record might get deleted more frequently than a No Current Budget record.

Step 5. Remove the Bounces

If someone has bounced email, these should be easy candidates to delete, right? It’s not so simple.

You might want to keep these around to maintain some reporting intelligence. You might also want to mail a few last times to mine data from those returned emails (See LeadGnome articles). Additionally, you might have a bounce that indicates a spam bounce rather than a no longer there bounce so you need to be careful to distinguish between the two.

How Often

Perform a one-time delete to start based on Email Invalid is TRUE if someone has an email address. There are another couple of pieces of criteria to customize.

Rinse and repeat quarterly/yearly once you have defined your retention duration

#6 Delete the Inactive – The Big Sweep

How long should someone live in your database without activity before you delete?

If you set you other five filters as conservative, this inactive criteria can serves as the final sweep. We’ve seen companies use very complex criteria to define this last step since its the end of the line for some data.

15 months of inactivity

Salesforce Leads only

No active opportunities

Not part of a certain lifecycle stage

And more

Tip: Marketo limits inactivity filters to 90 days. Create a custom Last Marketo Activity Date that populates every time a link is clicked, page is visited, etc. Use that date in future to determine inactivity.

Other Considerations

Send a Wake the Dead email before deleting with a few Wake the Dead emails.

Wake the Dead Example Copy. “Hey, we love you but is it time to say goodbye? If you want to keep receiving great content, click here, Or we’ll remove you from our database.”

How Often

Perform a one-time delete to start once you nail down the criteria

Rinse and repeat quarterly.

Some Bonus Tips

Before you delete, gain intel from those bounced with one last email. Sign up for an Email Mining service like LeadGnome. The trial will cost you zero and it takes 15 minutes to setup.

Pass on delete intelligence to Salesforce for records you are deleting from Marketo only. Before you delete from Marketo, just add a comment to the comments field or log an activity in Salesforce (Example: Record was deleted in Marketo because there is no valid email address). This will prevent the future “why didn’t this person receive an email?”

Wrapup

Remember that the Gold Nugget Data process is BOTH strategy and process. Make sure to set your strategy first to make ongoing management much easier.